01

Four kinds of committee, and why they are never ranked together

A governor’s campaign and a fire-levy committee are both committees. Sort them into one table by money and you get a list in which the levy never appears, and in which a $2,400 cheque and a $2.1M cheque sit in the same column meaning entirely different things. Washington governs the classes differently, so the register keeps them apart and explains each before you filter into it.

Candidate committees

One per candidate per race, dissolved after it. Contributions are capped — $2,400 per giver for statewide office, $1,300 for legislative — so no single funder can dominate one, and the largest-funder column is close to meaningless here by design.

Ballot measure committees

No contribution limits at all. One company or one union may lawfully fund an entire campaign. This is where the largest-funder column does its work, and where the biggest single numbers in the archive live.

Continuing political committees

PACs that persist between cycles, raising from members or donors and giving onward. Uncapped on the way in, capped on the way out when they give to a candidate. Most of the money in this archive passes through one of these.

Party committees

State, county and legislative-district party organisations, plus the caucus campaign committees. They operate under their own limits and exemptions, which is why a party committee’s numbers should never be compared to a PAC’s.

Source WA PDC committee registration classes (C-1) and RCW 42.17A contribution limits · as of 2026-08-12

02

The register

Alphabetical by default, as everywhere on this site. Raised and spent are separate columns and are never netted — a committee that raised $6.2M and spent $6.0M has not “made” $200,000, it has $200,000 left.

Largest single funder

The biggest itemised contribution from one giver across the cycle — not a controlling interest and not ownership. Where a committee reports only aggregated small giving, the cell says that instead of naming someone. The share is the one division we perform, and both operands are printed.

Class

A measure committee is one that filed a ballot number or a for/against stance — mechanical, from the registration. The design for this page imagines candidate, PAC and party as further classes; our extract of the register does not carry them, and deriving them from the name a committee chose for itself would put our judgement in a column that looks like a filing. So those classes are absent rather than guessed.

Source PDC C-1, C-3 and C-4 — name, funder and amounts are each copied from a form · as of 2026-08-12

03

Where most of the money came from one place

4 committees in this cycle drew more than half their itemised money from a single giver. Both columns are quoted from filings — the left from the registration, the right from the contribution reports. We put them side by side and add nothing.

Source PDC C-1 registrations beside C-3 contribution reports — threshold: over 50% of itemised raising, minimum $10,000 · as of 2026-08-12

04

What this directory will not compute

Each of these is a number a reader might reasonably expect. None of them follow from the records we hold, so we do not publish them.

A single ranking across classes

A governor’s campaign and a fire-levy committee are both committees, and sorting them into one money-ordered table produces a list in which the levy never appears. Classes are governed differently; the filter keeps them apart.

Netting raised against spent

The difference between raised and spent is cash on hand, not profit or virtue. The two columns stay separate and no column subtracts them.

A “dark money” list

Washington has no separate registration for a committee that only runs independent expenditures — it is an ordinary committee that files C-6 reports. So that is a flag on a row here, not a list with an ominous name.

Guessed classes

Candidate, PAC and party classifications are not in our extract of the register. Inferring them from committee names would be our judgement in a column that looks like a filing.

05

How this index is built

Population

Every committee with a record page in the 2026 cycle — 581 of them. The archive holds 3,341 committees across all cycles; earlier cycles gain pages as they are imported.

Identity

The PDC committee ID, never the name. Two committees sharing a name are two rows.

Amounts

Itemised contributions and expenditures summed from the reports. Unitemised small giving is on each committee’s page, stated separately, and is not in the raised column here.

Default order

Alphabetical. Every other order is available and none is the default, because the default is the site’s opinion about what matters.

Source WA Public Disclosure Commission committee filings · as of 2026-08-12